The wireless communication industry is responding to consumer demand for high speed data services. The increased Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum acquisition costs associated with the achievement of throughputs that are comparable with wired communication technology has dramatically enhanced the interest in new methods to obtain spectrally efficient modulation formats. The technical challenge posed by these emerging requirements is residing in the intrinsic physical limitations of the wireless propagation environment. Noise, interference, severe multipath and time-varying characteristics of the fading channel contribute to make high-speed wireless data communications a difficult and challenging problem. Traditional communication engineering theory states that an increase in data rate is achieved by a combination of an increase in bandwidth occupation, an increase in radiated power at the transmitter, and an increase in dimensionality in the signal space (that is the order of the digital modulation). A greater description of the prior art and background is provided in Appendix 1 of Provisional Application No. 60/136,699, filed on May 28, 1999 incorporated herein by reference.
Conventional communication technology is depicted in FIGS. 1A-B. A communication network between transceiver A and transceiver B employs a two-dimensional communication protocol using time and frequency. The message to be communicated is broken into a plurality of smaller messages, or packets, that can be sent in the various time slots and frequency slots, according to the communication protocol. Since the receiver knows the communication protocol, it can reassemble the packets to replicate the original message. This type of communication protocol is well known in the art. A greater description of the prior art and background is provided in Appendix 1 of Provisional Application No. 60/136,699, filed on May 28, 1999 incorporated herein by reference.
What is needed is a communication system that provides high data rate communication in a wireless environment. The present invention analyzes practical methods to demodulate high data rate signals transmitted from different positions (antenna elements), that are afflicted by arbitrarily time-varying fading characteristics, with arbitrary time dispersion (frequency selective fading). This is of significant practical interest because in practice the fading environment can never be considered perfectly static even if transmitter and receiver are not in relative motion. The presented method and apparatus do not need training sequences or signals to estimate the channel: this gives additional advantage in terms of throughput with respect to prior art. The method and apparatus is implemented using available hardware for digital radio transceivers.